>If this person is representative, this explains why computers are hundreds of times faster but most software feels slower than in 1999. I think they are repre

>If this person is representative, this explains why computers are hundreds of times faster but most software feels slower than in 1999. I think they are representative of a lot of developers. With the continued pace of chip development for the last 35 years, there hasn't been a continuing need to program for performance - in general, unless programmers did something very dumb or were dealing with large amounts of data, they could just write the way they wanted and let the hardware handle making their program fast. Contrast this with early computer games - to get the best performance some games would actually boot your computer without an OS, sacrificing some convenience to get the last few percent of speed needed out of the system because it was the only way to out perform the competition. One reason there's such opportunity in the present state of CPU technology (clock speeds have halted at about 4 Ghz in favor of more cores) is that few people remember how to program for performance, and those that do are handicapped by a bloated OS built for profit rather than value.